Suchergebnisse

Introduction and overview / Andrea J. Nightingale, Tom Böhler, and Ben Campbell -- Background and history of sustainability / Andrea J. Nightingale, Tom Böhler, Ben Campbell, and Linus Karlsson -- Narratives of sustainability : key concepts and issues / Andrea J. Nightingale, Linus Karlsson, Tom Böhler, and Ben Campbell -- Enacting sustainability / Andrea J. Nightingale, Tom Böhler, and Ben Campbell -- Issues of scale in producing sustainability / Andrea J. Nightingale and Linus Karlsson -- The range of environmental concerns / Andrea J. Nightingale and Linus Karlsson, Laura Saxer, and Ben Campbell -- Introduction to the case studies / Andrea J. Nightingale and Tom Böhler -- Alternative food movements and transition towns in the United Kingdom / Ben Campbell -- Community forestry and sustainability in Nepal / Dinesh Paudel -- Sustainable mining and the North / Nancy Langston -- Governing genetically modified crops and agricultural sustainability / Phil Macnaghten -- Rethinking sustainable community through permaculture initiatives in Zimbabwe / Pamela Richardson Ngwenya -- The entanglements of oil extraction and sustainability in the Ecuadorian Amazon / Angus Lyall and Gabriela Valdivia -- Sustainability and gender equality : exploring the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development / Sarah Bradshaw -- Sustaining what and by what means? : the importance of local social relations in the Sahel / Matthew D. Turner.

As a response to the march of privatization and neoliberal individualism, the commons have recently re-emerged as an attractive alternative. In this article, I bring a feminist political ecology critique to the burgeoning literature on commoning to develop a conceptualisation of how political communities of commoning emerge through socionatural subjectification and affective relations. All commoning efforts involve a renegotiation of the (contested) political relationships through which everyday community affairs, production and exchange are organised and governed. Drawing on critical property studies, diverse economies, feminist theory and commoning literatures, the analysis critically explores the relationship between property and commoning to reveal how the commons emerge from the exercise of power. Central to my conceptualisation is that commoning is a set of practices and performances that foster new relations and subjectivities, but these relations are always contingent, ambivalent, outcomes of the exercise of power. As such, commoning creates socionatural inclusions and exclusions, and any moment of coming together can be succeeded by new challenges and relations that un-common. I argue for the need to focus on doing commoning, becoming in common, rather than seeking to cement property rights, relations of sharing and collective practices as the backbone of durable commoning efforts. Becoming in common then, is a partial, transitory becoming, one which needs to be (re)performed to remain stable over time and space.

Clearly, Nepalis have to adapt to climate change. It is less clear what precisely the challenges are and who is best positioned to lead the response.

Clearly, Nepalis have to adapt to climate change. It is less clear what precisely the challenges are and who is best positioned to lead the response.

Building on Liverman's critique of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), I argue SDGs must be conceptualized as situated by (i) unpacking the black box of social, political and intellectual consensus behind indicators and (ii) reimagining development goals as dynamic performances that are uneven over time and space for both populations and individuals. Poverty, justice and other targets of SDGs are not a state of being but rather a punctuated experience for the individuals and populations in question. For the SDGs to be effective, they need to go beyond simple statistics to account for how situated, performative aspects of lives evolve, rather than as they are.

Feminist approaches to multi-scalar, more-than-human, power and politics pushes critical agrarian studies in novel directions. Gender-nature-body are critical sites for realignments of social, material and political relations, resulting in uneven access to and control over resources. Gender, race, class and other forms of intersectional socionatural relations are foundational to agrarian studies concerns such as class formation, collective action, extractivism and land grabs. The chapter reframes agrarian conflicts as the material and emotional outcomes of embodied, differentiated responses to enclosure and commodification, linking scales from the global economy to the uneven conditions of peoples' lives to illuminate spaces of transformation.

Power and politics have been central topics from the early days of Political Ecology. There are different and sometimes conflicting conceptualizations of power in this field that portray power alternatively as a resource, personal attribute or relation. The aim of this article is to contribute to theorizations of power by probing contesting views regarding its role in societal change and by presenting a specific conceptualization of power, one which draws on political ecology and sociotechnical approaches in science and technology studies. We review how power has been conceptualized in the political ecology field and identify three trends that shaped current discussions. We then develop our conceptual discussion and ask explicitly where power emerges in processes of resource governance projects. We identify four locations that we illustrate empirically through an example of rural electrification in Tanzania that aimed at catalyzing social and economic development by providing renewable energy-based electricity services. Our analysis supports the argument that power is relational and productive, and it draws on science and technology studies to bring to the fore the critical role of non-human elements in co-constitution of society – technology – nature. This leads us to see the exercise of power as having contradictory and ambiguous effects. We conclude that by exploring the tension between human agency and constitutive power, we keep the politics alive throughout the analysis and are able to show why intentional choices and actions really matter for how resource governance projects play out in everyday life.

Feminist theory has expanded the sphere within which politics is assumed to occur and thus can make significant contributions to research on state transition. This paper traces the development of a research project wherein we combined our expertise and feminist commitments to explore the current political transition in Nepal. The project conceptualized market formation and resource governance to be important sites of political contestation and the formation of citizen subjectivities. Within these sites, we sought to understand what 'democracy' looks like at different scales, especially where, when and how people make claims and build critical accounts of established social systems in its name. Here, we reflect how on our feminist political and intellectual commitments helped develop a collaborative methodology and approach to state transition that integrates 'politics' across scales. The insights include the role played by spaces of social reproduction in everyday processes of state and political transformation, and the analytical opportunities opened up when research collaborations take the form of a community of inquiry within the field itself. We found ourselves turning back to the long tradition of feminist scholarship to show how the household is the origin of inequalities and how such relations transmit into wider contestations over 'democracy'.

ABSTRACTRecent work on authority, power and the state has opened up important avenues of inquiry into the practices and contexts through which power is exercised. Why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains a challenge, however. In this article we bring together two bodies of thought to engage this issue, feminist theories of power and subjectivity and Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic violence, in order to explore how power and authority are reproduced and entrenched. Our purpose is to advance theorizing on power and authority in the context of contentious political situations and institutional emergence. This unusual theoretical synergy allows us to illustrate how power is exercised in relation to natural resource management and the ways in which the conflict/post‐conflict context creates institutional forms and spaces which simultaneously challenge and reinforce antecedent forms of authority. To animate our theoretical concerns, we draw on work in community‐based forestry in Nepal, with a focus on some of the conflicts that have arisen in relation to the valuableSalforests of the Terai, or lowland plains.

ABSTRACTRuptures that constitute exceptional events in national politics intersect in different ways with local politics, where more ongoing, continuous processes of both contestation and conservation around natural resource use may persist amidst a turbulent political landscape on other scales. Nepal, with its series of unfinished revolutions, civil war (1996–2006), and recurrently contested process of state (trans‐)formation, is a case in point. Through a study of a contested forest in mid‐western Nepal, this article analyses the entanglement of rupture and realignment of contentious claims to political authority across different scales, as well as the continuities of negotiations over claims to recognition of forest use and citizenship rights. The authors analyse some of the messy and complex practices through which authority to govern forests is claimed and legitimated, and citizenship rights are asserted and defined. They show that while political ruptures caused by the war and post‐war dynamics unsettle and reshuffle the political terrain, claims to citizenship and property rights endure, even if the language and form of the claim are adapted. These claims are embedded within existing jurisdictions but, at the same time, actors lay claims to property and citizenship rights by working across scales and re‐negotiating their boundaries. 'Making territory', the authors conclude, is the effect of the entanglement of these different territorial politics and practices.